Southeast Texas Urban Integrated Field Laboratory

SETx logo with letters SETx Urban IFL next to an outline of Texas with a star.

The Gulf Coast contains an extensive range of natural features and communities that are integrated into the regional economy. The region faces regular “acute-on-chronic” hazards in which short-notice technological and natural stressors (e.g., coastal storms, oil spills) occur alongside long-term chronic endogeneous and exogeneous stressors (e.g., ground subsidence, population growth, flooding, and pollution).

This region will serve as a bellwether of change, providing a use case for identifying and responding to opportunities to strengthen people’s livelihoods and regional prosperity.

This UIFL aims to address the following questions

  • Which processes and variables need to be captured in regional-scale hydrological and atmospheric models so they are representative of the conditions experienced by local communities along the southeast Texas Gulf coast and help inform response strategies?
  • How can researchers understand the linkages among and within natural, built, and other systems in urbanized regions to better support natural and human resilience?

The region for the UIFL is Southeast Texas (SETx), specifically the Beaumont-Port Arthur region. This urban area represents the adaptation needs, population diversity and vulnerability, and ecological richness that characterize many urban centers along the Gulf Coast. Beaumont has experienced continued urban expansion and increased impervious cover over the past several decades. These changes have likely led to increased urban heat island effect and reduced capacity to absorb rainwater. In addition, the Beaumont-Port Arthur area is home to a major economic driver of the region—one of the nation’s largest petrochemical industrial complexes, which forms the underpinning of future economic growth to the region.

The long-term goals for SETx-IFL are to provide quantitative understanding of projected regional pressures and opportunties in a way that is generalizable to other regions and improve community resilience through new and generalizable theories of change validated in SETx-IFL. To achieve these goals, SETx-IFL coordinates numerous disciplines, scholars, and community stakeholders toward the short-term goals of

  • Integrating new data, methods, and models about the interactions among natural, human-built, and socioeconomic systems.
  • Increasing our understanding of interdependencies, mutual benefits, and trade-offs of different wellbeing outcomes for humans and the environment.
  • Co-producing knowledge with stakeholders to achieve a rapid assimilation of DOE-supported basic research to the public and private sectors.
Photo of Beaumont, Texas

Beaumont, Texas. The Beaumont-Port Arthur region represents the adaptation needs, population diversity and vulnerability, and ecological richness that characterize many urban centers along the Gulf Coast.

Participating Institutions

  • Lamar University
  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory
  • Prairie View A&M University
  • Texas A&M University
  • University of Texas–Austin